When I worked at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, one of my great pleasures was to head to the basement stacks and look at the illuminated manuscripts kept down there. That may explain why I always see the Middle Ages in blazing, gilt-edged color, whereas when I think of the 1920s and 1930s in America I see a rather dark, black-and-white world. Perhaps that’s part of the reason I’ve never underestimated the Middle Ages.

The other reason is my passion of medieval church architecture. After all, how primitive can an era be when it’s capable of the magnificence of St. Chapelle in Paris, which is unequaled by anything else I’ve ever seen:

Prager University has produced a short video explaining that the Dark Ages weren’t dark at all. What the video doesn’t say, but I’ll pass along here is that part of why we look back upon them is because Western history was written by Protestants, who had a vested interest in making the Catholic Church look more repressive than it actually was.